Pirates of the Caribbean Online Wrap Report

Lessons Learned

The most important lesions we learned while working on Pirates of the Caribbean Online were:

1. Get a playable version up and running early. Many of the programmers were able to play the game in our development environment, but a number of team members didn't play much until late in the cycle. We would have benefited from getting their feedback earlier if there had been a playable build accessible to them.

we really wanted to capture the experience of being a movie pirate rather than trying to simulate extremely realistic naval combat. This meant we were always going for fun over realism

2. Build a medium-sized game and add features rather than making a more sizable one from the start. Our production schedule was massive and difficult to track because we started off creating something very large with an extensive feature set. We would have been able to track development better and to get to a playable beta earlier if we had started off smaller, with fewer features.

3. Your min spec needs to be lower than you think. It is amazing how many people are out there playing on low-end PC hardware. If you build your game for them, you can expand your audience significantly.

Audience Response

Pirates of the Caribbean Online has been warmly received by its community, many of whom have experienced the game through several months of beta tests and post-launch. Players really enjoy crewing up and adventuring at sea. We have discovered that we need to make the process of joining crews easier, since the game is so much fun for them, and some users have had difficulty linking up with their friends in this way.

The media response has been largely positive as well, although most coverage to date has been previews rather than reviews.

Looking Ahead

We have a lot of new content planned for the year already, with the focus on expanding both avatar and ship customization, extending the quest story lines, and adding more enemies and challenges. We expect to attract a diverse group of players, so the major challenges for us will involve creating new content for a range of different playing styles.

Personal Thoughts

In creating Pirates of the Caribbean Online, we really wanted to capture the experience of being a movie pirate rather than trying to simulate extremely realistic naval combat. This meant we were always going for fun over realism, which led us to rapid-fire cannons. It turns out that slowly reloading your cannons or running out of ammo just isn't as much fun as blasting away with improbable speed. Initially, we allowed the cannons to shoot so rapidly that the skies would be filled with flying cannonballs, which led to some pretty wild sea battles among the developers. As much fun as this was, we did eventually have to slow the firing rate down somewhat to avoid bogging down the CPU with so much work figuring out where all the shots were going.

Mike Goslin

VP, Disney Online

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Wrap Reports are intended to complement reviews by providing a post-release viewpoint we seldom see, that of the developer and/or publisher. Since introducing this format in November of 2003, we have had the pleasure to publish quite a few, primarily within the RPG and online world categories, with selected action and strategy games also represented. A complete list of the previous ones may be found on the next page. - Ed.